Siren Song
by Laudine
Summary: Slightly AU.  "All waters are the same, Elf-prince, for they all flow together eventually."  Legolas, a water sprite, and how the blood of Numenor still flows in the most unexpected of places.


**Disclaimer: I don't own **_**Lord of the Rings**_** by J. R. R. Tolkien or Frederick de la Motte Fouqué's **_**Undine**_**, but somehow, I thought it could work. This will mostly likely be only 3 or 4 chapters, 5 at most. Just a small what-may-have-been before Legolas left for Imladris. All original characters are mine. If I decide to write about what happens to Falmiel during the events of **_**The Lord of the Rings**_**, trust that she won't be a tenth walker.**

**Siren Song**

**Part One**

What smouldering senses in death's sick delay

Or seizure of malign vicissitude

Can rob this body of honour, or denude

This soul of wedding-raiment worn to-day?

For lo! even now my lady's lips did play

With these my lips such consonant interlude

As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed

The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay.

I was a child beneath her touch,-a man

When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,-

A spirit when her spirit looked through me,-

A god when all our life-breath met to fan

Our life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran,

Fire within fire, desire in deity.

-the sonnet _The Kiss_, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

_They were created by Ulmo to cheer Uinen's sad heart and tend the waters, and in time, their numbers grew, and when they would not join in the fight against Morgoth, Ulmo and the other Valar took away their grace. So now they live someplace between Elves and Men and Darkness, neither good nor evil, neither immortal nor mortal, but forever tied to the element from which they were created. Even if the world fell into shadow, they would still exist, for whatever might happen, water is the one thing that will remain and cannot be destroyed…_

-from the writings of Saruman the White

* * *

><p>It was said that for the Elves, the call of the sea was the hardest thing of all to resist.<p>

Legolas Greenleaf had heard that a thousand times during his childhood in Mirkwood, though he never held much stock in it. He had yet to hear the sound of the waves, the call of the sea, and wondered what was so alluring about it. He head heard the patter of the rain, the gurgling of the spring, the rush of the river, the gentle caressing sound the waves made on the shores of a lake, but never the sound of the sea.

There were, of course, the stories. The stories of humans who were lured to watery graves by mysterious music only they could hear. Once a man had washed up on the shores of the Brandywine River, drowned, but not with a face contorted in agony or fear. No, his eyes were closed and his blue lips curved into the slightest smile. It was almost as though before his death, he had encountered something that had brought him great bliss. Thranduil had shaken his head when Legolas had asked about it. "It is nothing for you to concern yourself with," his father told him. "He fell prey because he was a mortal. You will not be swayed by it."

There were other stories, too, that his mother and his nurse had told him, and stories that he had heard whispered when the twelve dwarfs and their burglar visited Mirkwood long ago. The stories of Goldberry and the other water sprites, some of whom would leave their waters in the spring to dance in the meadows so that the flowers would bloom, or so the stories went.

So the stories went.

So the stories went, Legolas thought, three springs before leaving for Rivendell and joining the Fellowship of the Ring, when he had heard tinkling laughter in the rain, and had thought nothing of it.

* * *

><p><em>For some, grace is something that can be restored. There were some waterfolk who fought in the First War of the Ring, yet very discreetly, flooding out Orc holdings or drying up streams and lakes, or making it rain so that they could not see, or extinguishing the fires. And in this way, some were able to earn back their grace, and pass it on to their descendants…<em>

-from the writings of Saruman the White

* * *

><p>Spring came, and Legolas-much like Mirkwood itself-felt renewed and awakened, shaking the bitter cold of winter off of him. He was alive, and there was a life to be lived in between now and next winter.<p>

He patrolled the borders as he normally did, and took direction from his father on how to be a king, and listened to the wisdom of Elrond of Rivendell when the Half-Elven would visit Mirkwood.

And in his spare time, in between patrolling and reading and delegating and listening, he would take stock of the new growth in the forest, of new blossoms and shoots peering out of the ground, of the fawns and nestlings and other new things born, of the newly thawed streams and the swollen Brandywine River.

He first saw her at dawn as she emerged from the Brandywine, and as a few others preceded her, laughing and speaking in a strange language that involved clicking sounds and a strange musicality. He saw the webbing between their tfingers and toes melt back into pale skin. He marveled at the water dripping from their hair, at the grace and ease of their movements, of the sheerness of their clothes and the strange simplicity that emanated from them.

They sat on the edge of the river, combing their wet hair, knotting what looked to be silver veils around their waists, producing little fish-mail slippers from the drawstring purses tied to their sheer kirtles.

He could not believe this.

The stories were true.

Water spirits _did_ roam in Mirkwood, yet only at the most opportune times of day.

Such were the wonders of Arda!

* * *

><p>His father and Elrond had known and had always known. They told him to let the water maids be, that they were only doing their father's bidding by swimming up the Brandywine and dancing through the clearings of Mirkwood at dawn or dusk so that the flowers and other plants would bloom. They danced underneath the sun and the moon-it didn't matter which-and they would sometimes dance with Men, and if one looked, one could see through a guise because the hem of her dress might be wet, but they never danced with Elves. To have a Man drown for love of them was one thing, but to have an Elf do so was another: a loss, a waste of grace. This was why they danced alone in Elf territory.<p>

But still Legolas was curious.

The curiosity would cost him his better judgment-and some might say that he had been bewitched, all during that spring until it passed into midsummer.

They knew that he had seen them, and when he and his patrol saw them emerge from the river, they laughed and shook their dripping heads and beckoned to him. "Come, Elf-boy!" they called. "Come dance with us! We will not harm you; there is no reason to fear us…"

And they laughed again, and he felt a tiny pang of embarrassment, until the one who had been silent stepped a little closer to him and addressed her companions. "He's not just any Elf-boy," she informed them, "but he is the King's son. The Prince-an Elf-prince!"

"An Elf-prince! A princeling!" was the tinkling reply, and they laughed again and beckoned him to dance, their eyes sparkling, their diaphanous skirts billowing as they twirled round on the cool grass.

The one who had spoken glanced at them with a sort of contempt in her eyes that soon faded when she saw that she was being watched.

"You don't dance," Legolas remarked, motioning for the rest of the patrol to move on as he approached her.

She shrugged. "I'm in no mood to dance."

He inclined his head. "Why not?"

"Because I simply am not."

He was flummoxed at this. Why would a water sprite not dance to bring forth the blossoms of spring and then of summer, to coax them into ripening into fruits for the fall?

"Anyhow," she continued, "my cousins are silly things. They are like the water from which they come-changeable from one moment to the next." She frowned and glared down at the cool, clear waters of the Brandywine before her, and Legolas leaned forward.

"Why are you different?" he asked her, and she glanced up at him, her dark blue eyes questioning, guarded.

"Why do you ask such questions?" she retorted. "Surely an Elf-and an Elf-prince at that-would know the answers!"

"But I have never encountered one such as you," he replied, "and so this is why I ask."

"And yet I thought Elves were versed in all ways of the world!" she exclaimed, laughing, tossing her head and rising to her feet as lightly as a bubble.

"You are from different waters?" he asked her cautiously, and she rolled her eyes and sauntered away from him.

Then she stopped, and she turned, regarding him for a moment, and then she said, with a crooked smile, "All waters are the same, Elf-prince, for they all flow together eventually. But sometimes they are a little different."

With that she laughed again, and her demeanor became as carefree as that of the other sprites, and he watched her departing figure as she skipped lightly into the wood.

* * *

><p>Legolas told Thranduil of what he had seen and about his conversation with the water sprite later that evening at dinner, and his father's brow furrowed as he related the last words:<em> All waters are the same, Elf-prince, for they all flow together eventually.<em>

Legolas heard the deep laughter from the chair in the shadowy corner, and Mithrandir rose from his seat, taking his pipe from his mouth. He smiled down at Legolas indulgently. "So you have spoken with a water maid-and she did not laugh at you right away?"

"I've spoken with a water maid," Legolas replied succinctly. "But she did laugh."

"But you spoke with her," Mithrandir persisted softly, his eyes glinting with a strange, knowing light. "You spoke with her, and the conversation was clear, and she corrected her fellow water maids when they laughed at you."

"But still she laughed."

"They always laugh."

"And why do they always laugh?"

Mithrandir sat back in his seat, setting the pipe between his teeth once more. He puffed at it thoughtfully, watching Legolas's eyes upon him. Then he removed the pipe once more, his face growing distant as he stared into the fire.

"They are not corporeal creatures like you and I are. Rather, they are bound to their element-and much like their element, they are changeable. They can be dangerous, they can be benign…there is no constant in a water spirit's nature. And that is what makes them so dangerous." Mithrandir's gaze slid up to Legolas. "Even to Elves."

"And because water is capricious, so are they," Legolas murmured. "Yet how can such creatures be dangerous if they are the ones who help the flowers to bloom each spring?"

"They are dangerous," Mithrandir explained, "because their element can be harnessed. I might use water magically for good, but someone else might think to use it for evil. And we know how destructive water can be. If there is too much, if there is too little, if there are floods, if one can't resist its currents…If a magician chooses to use the waters for ill, then so are creatures within it bound to his will until the magic is gone."

And so Legolas's curiosity was satisfied for the time being, yet he still remembered the water maid's words.

_All waters are the same, Elf-prince, for they all flow together eventually. But sometimes they are a little different._

Legolas would remember these words years later, standing before the ruins of Saruman's fortress. He would see a diaphanous figure clad in a torn dress that shimmered with all of the greens and silvers of the waters. And she would be kneeling on what had once been the roof of an ironworks which had just been flooded, and she would be weeping.

And then he would remember that water elementals had no tears.


End file.
